Vegetable gardening is nutritious in both body and mind. It’s exciting to watch a little seed turn into a sprout, then into a small plant, and eventually, into a big ole squash plant that’s bursting with bright yellow gourds and giant green leaves. Digging your hands into cool soil is meditative. Smelling the basil and dill is heavenly. And you don’t have to live on a country estate to grow your own food at home, either.
City dwellers can plant vegetables in patio container gardens. In cold climates, you can start a small garden indoors or even grow vegetables outdoors most of the year if you have a greenhouse.
When it comes to planning a backyard vegetable garden, ideas are easy to come by. There are plenty of pictures of elaborate gardens with rows of sun-ripened tomatoes, entire sections devoted solely to peas, raised beds for root vegetables, and, of course, a fountain and seating area. We don’t all have gigantic yards, though. As nice as it would be to have row after row of heirloom tomatoes and cucumbers, it’s just not realistic when your backyard garden is a two-foot by four-foot rectangle between your driveway and the foundation of your house.
The thing is, you can create a really nice garden in that small rectangle of space. It’s a simple matter of timing, design, and plant selection. But if you have a large backyard, even better!
In the articles below, we dive into everything you need to know about vegetable gardening. You can learn even more in our How to Grow a Vegetable Garden: 10 Things Every Gardener Needs to Know Before Starting a Food Garden freebie. Enjoy!
Editor’s note: This list of the best strawberries to grow in your garden is updated annually, based on ratings from the Burpee website. With most of our “best of” lists, there are some changes from year to year. Some fruits or vegetables move up or down in ratings, and some varieties lose their spot in the list altogether. Surprisingly, […]
The first time I planted an herb garden and saw my chives, sage, and thyme grow back in the second year, I jumped to wondering what other kinds of herbs and vegetables regrow a second season and beyond. Living in New England, even perennial herbs like Rosemary are considered “tender perennials” depending on how harsh your winter gets, so could there be perennial vegetables that differ in their perennial-ness, too?
If time machines were a thing, you could go back to a classic 1972 Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial, where in the commercial, a man trips and falls, accidentally dipping his chocolate bar into a jar of peanut butter that a boy is eating from. After the initial disappointment, they both discover that chocolate and peanut butter are “two great tastes that taste great together.” You can’t plant Reese’s Cups, but if you want two garden plants that taste great together, try basil and tomato companion planting. It’s a Caprese salad right in your garden!
Let’s talk about health. No, I’m not your doctor, and no, I’m not about to make you feel guilty about the fact that you didn’t exercise yesterday. I, too, may or may not have exercised yesterday. As a food gardener, though, I am interested in what I eat and how it impacts my health. Since I can’t very well grow a chocolate bar in my garden, that topic is a bit more limited to vegetables that grow above ground and those that grow below ground.
When Emily Dickinson wrote this poem in the mid-1800s, she may or may not have been thinking about flowers for a vegetable garden. There’s really no way to say. She is, however, absolutely correct in that without bees and other pollinators, we would have a lot fewer fruits and vegetables in this world. Melons, squash, cucumbers, blueberries, cranberries, and cherries would all be lost without pollinators. I’ve seen tomato plants grow sky high without growing a single tomato.
There are plenty of opinions out there about what to do with root-bound tomato plants. Some gardeners will tell you they’re destined for the compost pile, while others insist that with a little extra attention, a root-bound tomato plant can recover and go on to produce perfectly good tomatoes. I tend to fall into the […]
Hey there, fellow green thumbs and food enthusiasts! We’ve embarked on an epic quest through our vast network of food gardeners and scoured the Internet’s deepest, darkest corners to unearth the absolute cream of the crop when it comes to garden-related humor. We’ve suffered through countless puns, endured a deluge of garden gags, and emerged […]
I don’t know about you, but one of my favorite Saturday morning activities is to sit down with a cup of tea and one of my favorite vegetable gardening magazines and dream about all the exciting veggies I could grow. Of course, that doesn’t happen every Saturday, but that’s okay. And did you know how […]
Ah… the English vegetable garden. Maybe I’ve watched too many British television shows, but I picture an English vegetable garden as a place to take my afternoon tea with a book and biscuit whilst colorful Peacock butterflies flit about and the birds sing their happy songs.
Staying up to date on vegetable garden trends and coming up with new garden design ideas can be exhausting if you don’t know where to turn. Following gardening Instagram influencers can be a great resource for new growing methods and photo tutorials. It’s also really helpful to see real-life examples of people using different garden tools or growing techniques.
